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Audio Guides - Hyperlocal radio substrate

For about ten years we’ve been doing ‘expeditions’, concerts that were always open to local input, sounds, participants, languages, media. The idea was to never simply impose individual auteur-driven ‘art’ on listeners, but to try to make the experience more relevant by opening it to all kinds of local contamination. Loosely imitating the way ideas circulated in the Middle Ages, we would also take the sounds of one place and insert them in other places, a kind of cross-pollination, without forcing, letting stuff happen.
Now the idea is to go beyond the concert format, which honestly is starting to feel very anachronistic. The imposed separation of performer and audience, stage and seating, light and darkness perpetuates a false divide that has very little to tell us regarding the way people experience (or want to experience) sound today.
Our recent experiments involve the use of radio (in the widest sense of the term, not only that of broadcasting on AM or FM frequencies). Instead of a concert, a situation that is like a radio, to be experienced on both sides of the circuit of transmission-reception. Very small local transmitters, programs produced in real time, podcasts and mp3 files, with practically no distinction between musical programming and other forms of communication. The radio metaphor makes all the sound into material for composition and improvisation, including propaganda, advertising, discussion, news, music, even static and interference.
For listeners, participants and musicians alike the experience can resemble an installation, a workshop, a performance, depending on the situation.
We have recently completed the following audio guide projects:

1. Isola Art Center during the event The People’s Choice in Milan, Italy (27 March 15 May 2006). Audio tracks are posted here.

2. Turchin Center for the Visual Arts, Boone, NC, USA, for the event See Hear (7-14 April 2006) - for full documentation and sounds go here

3. Assab One, Milan, Italy, during the show by Nathalie Du Pasquier (starts in April, but our thing happens on 4 May 2006) - now a CD with catalogue. More info here

4. The apartment building “Il Cairo”, Milan, Italy, during the event Contact (11-14 May 2006). For documentation and sounds go here

5. Itinerario Festival, Cesena, 22-25 June. Every evening the results of the day's recordings and investigations will be played in an outdoor supine video view context in a park. The sounds then get mixed into an interactive track for a concert with the group Aidoru. Excellent results. Check out the full webpage here